Vista - Clean Install From Upgrade Vista

Hello Mara, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Q1) Yes, you can select the C: partition to install Vista onto with harming your D: Recovery partition.

Q2) It depends if your new Ultimate Vista version is a 32 bit or 64 bit Vista. If it is a 64 bit Vista Ultimate version, then you will need to download and save the 64 bit versions of the device's drivers from the device manufacturer's or OEM website. If it is a 32 bit Ultimate version, then you should still be able to use the drivers from the Asus DVD.

Most DVD drives use firmware instead of drivers that are on a chip in the DVD itself, so it should be fine.

Q3) During the first installation of Vista Ultimate you would format your C: partiton, so you will be doing a clean installation instead of a upgrade. When you get to STEP TWO of the tutorial you are just selecting the first install of Vista Ultimate to upgrade to the second install of Vista Ultimate.

A Upgrade version of Vista must be installed from within a operating system. This tutorial is a workaround to allow you to do a fresh clean install with your upgrade Vista Ultimate version instead of upgrading from within Vista Basic to Vista Ultimate and having remnants of Vista Basic still on your hard drive.


Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks for the quick response!! Its all 32 bit by the way

Just to be sure, during the first installation from the big list of Vista Version, I:
-dont choose Home Basic for the clean installation
-but use immediately Vista Ultimate for the clean installation

so I can upgrade this (not-activated) Ultimate to Ultimate with my Product Key (for Ultimate Upgrade)?
So this way you never install Home Basic, and you don't have that baggage ?

I've read from several people that have been having problems with their Upgrade DVD not being accepted, probably because new pc/laptops are preinstalled with SP1, while Microsoft (still) sells Upgrade DVD's without SP1.
So this is the perfect workaround!

Ill probably try this today, will let know if it works!
Thanks!

Mara,

Yep, you would format your old Home Basic version, and select Ultimate for the clean install (STEP ONE), then upgrade to Vista Ultimate (STEP TWO).

Hi, I seem to be having a problem with this...at about 78% on the complete upgrade portion of the second install, I get an error telling me a component was unable to be installed, and I must start over....#$%^&!!!! I cant seem to get by this, and Have gone through 6 (12 when you consider the double install) try's...any ideas?

Could you post the exact error message? It may help in determining what may be wrong.

Thanks for the quick reply Brink... I seem to have remedied my problems...For any of you who may experience problems even when following the instructions here, may want to remove ALL unnecessary hardware for the install...sound cards, USB Bluetooth Mouse, Secondary SATA drives, etc... I finally got it working stripping down to bare minimums and then reinstalling my peripherals after updating. CJ

CJ, I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted out and installed. Thank you for posting back your results.

Shawn

Okay the guide is fairly straight forward but before I embark on my adventure I have a question or 2.

My new computer has a brand new Terabyte HD and I was thinking of partitioning it with a main partition of 100 gigs for vista & then 4 additional partitions of 225 gig each ( or I might just go with 5 200 gig partitions) but the guide only talks about formating the whole drive in step 14. I mainly just want to have seperate the drive so I have a main drive, and then seperate drives for Games, Entertainment (music dvd's etc), Data and Applications, and a drive to use for a networked shared folder/drive.

"14. Click Format to format the hard drive. (See screenshot below)
NOTE: If you have more than one partition on this hard drive and want to get rid of it to make one big drive, then click Delete for each partition. Now click New and adjust the partition size to what you want, then click Format."

How would I do that? I noticed the picture for step 15 shows an option at the bottom that say extend. So should I first format the whole drive and then use the extend option to split up the drive? Am I understanding correctly or is there a better way of doing this?

Sorry if this is a stupid question but figure its best to ask now before I start instead of being confused later

Sincere Thx
Jess

Hi Jess,

It may be easier to use Disk Mangement in Vista after you have installed it to create the new partitions. However, you are limited to be able to only create 4 partitions, not 5.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

So if I understood the other guides header I could make a primary partition thats 200 gig for Vista and then then a second partition (extended) that uses up the rest of the drive and create the other 4 sections as logical drives on that partition? Is that correct?